Mobile wireless communication has progressed from closed platforms in primarily voice-based cellular phones to becoming embedded in a variety of open platforms which support data and voice such as smartphones, notebook computers and personal digital assistants (PDAs). Currently many different types of wireless communication systems, such as WLANs and cellular networks, can provide different levels of services. When a user desires to use different levels of service for a geographic area with which they are not familiar, it is difficult to determine which services are available. Often, a user must contact the wireless service provider to determine which types of services are available in which geographical areas. If the user travels in many different geographic areas, the burden of trying to determine which services are available in which geographic areas becomes too great.
Consumer products are also migrating toward wireless connected devices. For example, digital cameras are being incorporated into wireless cell phones, which can transfer large volumes of image data transparently from the camera to the user's home or a desired Web host. This eliminates the tedious requirement of connecting to a PC for data exchange. As the capabilities of these wireless devices (and the associated memory requirements) grow, there is a pressing need to offer data exchange and synchronization capabilities, such as picture downloading, email exchange and location-specific information targeted at a user. To facilitate this need, high speed wireless connections are required.
Traditional wireless networks are primarily designed for full time connectivity of audio signals from multiple users. While such a system can handle large bandwidth file transfers, generally the system is optimized for audio (telephone) communications and may not effectively be able to handle large bandwidth files efficiently. With current generation mobile wireless systems, the data is transferred at rates of between 10 and 100 Kb/s. With more advanced third generation (3G) networks, the data rates may be as high as 2 Mb/s. Even at this rate, the transfer of 10 Mb of data would take at least 5 seconds. It is desirable to have a low-cost high-data rate network, which supports the wireless transfer of large volumes of data.